To electrify your prayer time, schedule a prayer vigil for your small group, mission team, or entire church. A prayer vigil is a watchful, awake time set apart for the purpose of prayer. Over the years, I have organized a two-hour vigil for our small group, a 12-hour prayer vigil for my short-term mission team, and a weekly (for eight weeks) four-hour prayer vigil for our church. Here are some ideas that worked for our 12-hour vigil. They will help you organize and make your next vigil a success.
First—Pray.Seek the Lord's guidance on how, when, and why you want to do the prayer vigil. I plan my own personal vigil, praying and fasting and seeking the Lord's will in any group vigil that I plan.
Second—the logistics. Select a length of time and location for your vigil. You can make it one hour or as long as your group can go with the Lord's leading. We scheduled ours on a Friday night from 7 PM—7 AM. We picked this time so most people could attend the vigil and sleep when the vigil was over without interfering with work or church schedules. We did not make it mandatory for anyone to attend. In fact, we suggested people come when they could. About five of our group of 14 stayed the entire 12 hours. All but two of the 14 made it to the vigil.
One team member volunteered his house for the vigil. Since he had a large property, we were at liberty to do some things we could not have done at a smaller or inside-only location.
Third—collect requests. Since our vigil was specifically for the mission team, I asked everyone on the team to write their personnel prayer requests on index cards and turn them in to me before the vigil. We did not limit how many index cards anyone could turn in, but we did only want personal requests. Since this was a targeted vigil, we did not want to get sidetracked with requests that were not relevant to our mission or individuals on the mission team.
Next, I emailed the missionaries we were supporting and asked for their requests. I also asked them to provide any information about the culture/population/mission plans for which we could be in prayer. I put their prayer requests on index cards as well.
Fourth—the vigil itself. I developed a schedule for our vigil since it was 12 hours long. This is what we did.
- Worship time. I assigned a team member to bring CDs and songs lyrics. We started with music. Throughout the night we would go back to praise music. At one point, we built a bon fire and a team member played his guitar while we sang praise songs.
- Silent time. We each spent an hour alone with God, not talking to anyone but God. The purpose of this was to be still and quiet ourselves and to listen to anything God wanted to say to us. We had two of these times during the 12 hours.
- Prayer for individuals. Next we passed the index cards around. Each person prayed for the requests on their index cards. We gave participants the option of praying alone or in small groups. We had three of these times during our vigil.
- Group prayer for members of the team. During a time when almost everyone was present, we each took turns praying for every individual on the team. Each person praying shared whatever he/she felt led to share about the blessing this particular team member was to him or her. This was one of the most powerful times of our vigil. We wept and laughed in our prayers while edifying each member of the group.
- Ending the vigil. A half hour before the vigil ended, we were all pretty tired and goofy. We did some humorous reminiscing about the last 12 hours—like how one member decided to climb a tree during quiet time and how one (the biggest guy on the team) freaked out when he saw a bug.
- Benefits. Our team bonded more during this prayer vigil than at any other time in our eight-month preparation for the mission trip. We became a family during that vigil. Spending the night in prayer allowed God to minister to the entire team collectively and individually. This experience brought us closer to God and His will for us during the mission trip, which was a great success.
